A quick guide to protecting your human resource departments from cyber security attacks.  HR is a target for sensitive employee data.  Maintaining the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of HR solutions, process and people is important and challenging.

Employee data is central, protect employee personal data, including personal identifiers such as social security numbers, addresses, and any financial information. Use access controls to limit access to employee data only to authorised personnel who need it for their job roles applying least privilege.

Conduct employee training and awareness training to HR staff to educate them about cyber threats to organisations, phishing, social engineering, and best practices for handling sensitive employee information.

Use multi-factor authentication as the authentication mechanisms for accessing any HR related solution.

Regularly patch and update HR systems, including human resource management software, applicant tracking systems, recruitment systems, as part of solution vulnerability management.

Use role-based access control to ensure that HR have appropriate levels of access to HR solutions and HR data based on their job responsibilities. Roles should be regularly reviewed for changes and leavers from the HR team.

Encrypt sensitive employee data at rest and in transit for all HR solutions and data to protect the confidentiality.

Create an incident response playbook specific to HR security incidents. Define roles, responsibilities for HR staff in the event of a security incident involving employee data.

Assess the security posture of solution vendors and service providers. Ensure they follow industry standard security controls and have appropriate data protection measures in place.

Establish policies, standards and procedures for data retention and secure disposal of employee data. Regularly review and purge outdated or unnecessary employee data to minimize the risk of unauthorised access and unauthorised data retention.

Implement physical security controls, such as restricted access to HR offices, to protect physical records and HR solutions from unauthorized access of data whether it be electronic of physical paper.

Use logging and monitoring to search for and detect potential security incidents including unauthorised access attempts to HR data, solutions and facilities.

Regularly back up HR solution and employee data to ensure data availability and recoverability in the event of data corruption, or security incidents.  Test on a regular basis that backups work and are reliable.

Follow relevant data protection and privacy regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Conduct regular security assessments of HR solutions and access controls to identify vulnerabilities, weaknesses, or gaps in security. Address any findings and continuously improve HR security posture.

Any other areas or concerns you see protecting HR resources?  Let me know.  I hope you found this article useful and of educational value.